THIS week’s case of a man jailed for his obsessive harassment of a former classmate offers a chilling insight into how far such offenders are prepared to go.

Elliot Fogel became fixated on Claire Waxman, ruining her and her family’s life in the process

Like so many of us Elliot Fogel used a wedding picture as the screensaver image on his computer.

Only in his case the photograph was not of him and his wife but of another couple entirely.

Fogel was in fact a sad loner and the bride in the picture was a woman called Claire Waxman, who'd had the misfortune to catch his eye as a sixth former at Oaklands College in St Albans some years earlier.

In 2003 he embarked on a 12-year campaign of stalking that was so relentless and intrusive that Waxman developed insomnia and a stomach ulcer, lost large amounts of weight and suffered a miscarriage.

In one year alone Fogel googled her name 40,000 times - sometimes at a rate of 20 an hour.

He bombarded her with late-night phone calls, letters, flowers and bizarre gifts. He also spent countless hours following her and on one occasion broke into her car.

Waxman, a 38-year-old mother-of-two, and her husband were forced to move house five times in a bid to shake off her deranged stalker but each time he succeeded in tracking her down to their new address.

This week the law caught up with Fogel, 40, a former producer at Sky Sports and Capital Radio, and he was jailed for three and a half years for breaching a life- time restraining order banning him from contacting her.

"Stalkers wreck their victims' lives," said Waxman after the verdict.

"My family and I have had to endure 12 years of persistent stalking and we just wish that Fogel would desist so that we can lead a normal life."

Even if Fogel does nothing else he will still control the rest of Claire Waxman's life because she will always be looking over her shoulder

Neil Addison, barrister

Indeed Britain is experiencing a stalking epidemic with an estimated 1.2 million women and 900,000 men being victims of what one campaigner calls "a very insidious form of violence" every year.

One of these was Alexis Bowater, a former presenter of the Six O'Clock News on ITV West-country.

"I was cyber--stalked by Alexander Reeve," she says.

"We didn't know who he was at the time.

"We just knew that threatening emails were coming into the newsroom regarding myself because I was pregnant."

When Bowater returned from maternity leave the threats resumed with redoubled violence after she became pregnant with her second child.

"Stalkers don't go backwards in their threats, they escalate.

"This time they included threats of rape. He threatened to blow up myself and my colleagues while we were on air and the final one said that I would be found hanging nine months pregnant.

"It was extraordinarily traumatic. I was heavily pregnant, I had extra police patrols going past my house, I had a panic alarm installed at home and we were in talks with the police about having a panic room put in."

Bowater, who is now an anti-stalking campaigner, turned out to be fortunate in the sense that her police force understood the gravity of stalking as a crime and by dint of inspired detective work tracked down her tormentor.

Reeve was jailed in 2009 with one of the longest sentences that's ever been handed down in this country for cyber stalking: four years and one month.

But Bowater soon found out how lucky she had been: "The reason I started campaigning was because I discovered with growing incredulity that how you're treated as a stalking victim in the UK is not so much a question of a postcode lottery as postcode pot luck.

"There were thousands of people in this country who were suffering from this sort of crime who were not being taken seriously by the police."

She adds: "Stalking can lead on to much, much more serious crimes.

"An American survey showed that, in 76 per cent of ex-partner murders, stalking is a build-up to the tragic event."

While neither Bowater nor Waxman had been in a relationship with their stalker about half of all campaigns of harassment involve former partners.

What psychologists call infatuation harassment - of the sort suffered by Waxman - accounts for just under 20 per cent while sadistic stalking such as Bowater's makes up 13 per cent.

The remainder is attributed to delusional fixation.

The most successful stalkers, according to Neil Addison, a barrister who specialises in harassment law, are often highly intelligent and manipulative.

And in the internet age their job has never been easier. "When you deal with stalkers now they will have a vast amount of information on their victim," he says.

"Old-style stalking, in the sense of following somebody around, was always physically difficult."

That said, as Addison points out in relation to Waxman: "Even if Fogel does nothing else he will still control the rest of Claire Waxman's life because she will always be looking over her shoulder.

"That's the tragedy."

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